Professor Kenneth W. Abbott and Willard H. Pedrick, both of Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability, argue in a recent paper (available here) that the designers of climate financing mechanisms such as the Adaptation Fund should learn from the successes of recent global health institutions. The abstract reads:

“The process of designing the Green Climate Fund (GCF) will reshape the global architecture of climate change financing over the coming months. Yet the promise of the GCF is imperiled by its embrace of 20th century state-centric approaches to governance that fail to engage the resources and energies of non-state actors. Designers of the GCF - as well as the Adaptation Fund and other funds – should instead learn from the successes of the new generation of global health institutions, which integrate the capacities of stakeholders through direct participation in governance.”

The participative decisionmaking processes praised by the report include populations directly affected by health threats who participate directly in governing bodies, deliberation and decision-making. Health institutions proposed as models include UNAIDS (combats AIDS at national and global levels), the GAVI Alliance (finances vaccine purchases and immunization programs in developing countries, as well as conducts vaccine research) and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The authors assert that the international climate programs are heading in the opposite direction.